As a newspaper devoted to investigative reporting, most of the Las Vegas Sun's news pages were comprised of enterprise stories that were rarely tethered to breaking news events that could be documented by staff photographers. And if the stories were about state government, we'd have to hire a freelancer to do the shoot in Carson City — using funds from a limited budget.

In short, images were hard to come by.

What I learned to do was to make archive images seem fresh by carefully integrating additional storytelling elements, strong display type, powerful typography and formal design elements.  All of these in tandem take pressure off the visual while making the overall design more architectonic.